new directions for intergroup meetings tom lancaster
TRANSCRIPT
New directions for intergroup meetings
Tom Lancaster
• We’re hoping to make talks more accessible, wide-ranging and interesting
• Less emphasis on technical descriptions of your most recent results
• Talks can be introductory, speculative, provocative and outside the immediate field of materials physics.
What are we trying to do?
Particular suggestions
Journal club: a discussion of a scientific paper
Topical physics: ideas from across physics needed to understand something in your field
Personal hobby-horse: be it cookery, rocketry, electronics, music…
Discussion and debates
Please submit talk titles in advance
• If something looks too inaccessible, we’ll ask you to think again
• Please don’t be offended!
Suggestions box
If you have something you’d like someone to talk about send an email to chairs or to
Journal club talks
Pick a paper. Nature, Science, PRL, historically important
Paper by L D Landau, JEPT 30, 1058 (1956)
Describes a new, phenomenological model of metals
Context and background
• What problem is being discussed? • Why is this important?• Who is writing the paper?
The fermi gas treats electrons as non-interacting
It describes metals very well, but it shouldn’t
Electrons interact very strongly – is there a better way?
Lev Landau invented much of condensed matter physics, his answer to this question caused a revolution.
What’s in the paper
• What are the important results described?
• What do the authors conclude?
Fermi liquid made of quasiparticles – one for each electron
Excitations are unstable, but the ones near the Fermi energy live the longest
Landau’s expansion of the energy allows him to describe the system withonly a few parameters
What do you think of the paper?
• Are the results convincing?• Can someone else do better• Keep literary criticism to a minimum!
What do you think of the paper?
• Are the results convincing?• Can someone else do better• Keep literary criticism to a minimum!
Early Chinese chemists could not have imagined two thousand years ago that BaCuSi2O6 was not only an attractive purple pigment but also a potential solid state device for exploring the quantum effects of a BEC at liquid 4He temperatures in magnetic fields. (PRL 93, 087203 (2004))
Landau’s paper is very sketchy – it’s hard to know what the big idea is
It turned out to be incredibly important – the standard model of CMP
It’s a work of genius!
Future work
• What next for this field?
• How does this paper fit into the grand scheme
Guide to talks
• Keep them short• Make it simple• Keep slides uncluttered• Everyone likes history, psychology, sociology…• Avoid length conclusions!
• See N D Mermin, Physics Today, November 1992, page 9.